AppExchange contains more than 7,000 proven prebuilt apps and certified experts to help customers solve business problems across any industry and line of business. As food manufacturer Beyond Better Foods (BBF) learned, having a central portal for apps that address your business challenges can streamline technology costs and turn your investments into profits faster.

Customer spotlight

BBF was expanding quickly and had outgrown its inventory management system. This required manual data entry, resulting in errors and precious staff time spent fixing them. The first solution the company found on AppExchange was GoldFinch, an enterprise resource management app customized to meet the needs of consumer packaged goods organizations. Next, it utilized Tableau to analyze data and deliver new business insights. Finally, Accounting Seed helped BBF better organize and unify its financial procedures.

These three apps, integrated with Customer 360, helped the company:

Eliminate manual errors and increase productivity by 16%.

Save $200,000 a year by managing inventory more efficiently and greatly reducing costs from expired, thrown-away goods.

Retire licenses with other service providers, saving over $18,000 a year.

Reduce staff time spent on creating reports and forecasts by 70%.

In total, BBF achieved an ROI of 769% on its AppExchange investments — and it did it in less than two months.

Trust is our #1 value

All partners are carefully vetted by Salesforce for their knowledge, credentials, and experience, and the quality and consistency of their products. Before partners can publicly list their app on AppExchange, it must pass a security review. The AppExchange security review tests the security posture of partner apps, including how well it protects customer data. It identifies security vulnerabilities that a hacker, malware, or other threat can exploit. Salesforce security review teams test with threat-modeling profiles that are based on the most common web vulnerabilities. The teams attempt to penetrate the defenses programmed in apps. Their goal is to extract or modify data that they don’t have permission to access, just as security threats attempt to do.

You will see a consulting partner’s level of expertise within the Expertise tab of their consultant listing on AppExchange. From a Level I Specialist, who possesses the knowledge to deliver customer success in a product or industry vertical, to an Expert.

Tips for using AppExchange

AppExchange makes it easy to find the apps and experts that cater to your business needs.

Tip 1: The intelligent search bar will guide you to solutions most relevant to your use cases, taking into account your organization’s Customer 360 profile, your search history, and feedback from thousands of customers with similar needs.

Tip 2: When you click to view a solution, you will immediately see customer ratings, a link to customer reviews, product information, vendor contact information, and pricing plans to help you quickly narrow your choices. Some partner apps are free.

Tip 3: Your business is evolving, and the technology for managing it also changes over time. AppExchange is a dynamic platform where partners continue to release state-of-the-art solutions to meet new challenges as they arise.

In addition to the solutions provided by partners, AppExchange offers free, prebuilt, and customizable apps through Salesforce Labs. Built by Salesforce employees, these apps help solve common business challenges in sales, customer service, IT, human resources, and other operations.

Luxury hotel and time-share company Royal Resorts discovered the value of Salesforce Labs apps during the pandemic, when it had to close all of its properties for about 6 weeks. The company, which had previously digitized manual processes and achieved a 4% increase in sales penetration by using other AppExchange apps, decided to put the lull in business to good use by maximizing employee training.

To do that, it deployed Trail Tracker, a Salesforce Labs apps solution that enhances Salesforce’s free online learning platform, Trailhead. Trail Tracker allowed Royal Resorts to automatically assign individuals to the specific Trailhead modules they needed to hone their skills. The app’s prebuilt reports and dashboards also enabled managers to track progress, making sure employees and teams were gaining knowledge that would help them solve the kind of business challenges they were likely to encounter.

Thanks to the targeted training, Royal Resorts was able to hit the ground running as soon as it reopened.

Salesforce Labs apps offer many other ways to fast-track your business without depleting your budget. For example, streamline and automate scheduling tasks with Schedule-o-matic 9000, or mass migrate your notes and attachments with Magic Mover. 

With Salesforce CRM Dashboards, track sales and service KPIs from start to finish, monitor team and individual performance, generate reports with easy-to-use formulas and filters, and deliver actionable insights to executives and team members. 

Gain deeper knowledge about your customers with Einstein Intent Assessor, which analyzes customer actions to determine what they’re really trying to accomplish. These insights will help you better personalize your marketing and route leads and service requests to the right person the first time.

You can also gain insights into how your organization is functioning and make sure work is proceeding as it should. For example, Salesforce Adoption Dashboards displays who’s logging in to your applications and who isn’t. Milestones PM tracks projects, milestones, tasks, and budgets, allowing you to spot red flags. It also creates detailed reports so you can understand problems at a glance and tweak your processes if you notice troublesome trends.     

Other apps simplify onboarding, set up meeting times in seconds, and provide free images and icons to enliven your presentations.

If you’re not sure where to start, check out the top trending apps to see some of the solutions other organizations are using to jumpstart productivity and boost customer engagement.

In today’s uncertain economic environment, businesses need to find ways to do more with less. On AppExchange, you can do that by using Flows and Collections. Flows bring time-saving automations and capabilities to the apps you already use, and Collections provide an efficient way to find multiple, similar problem-solving apps. Both make your work processes more efficient, allowing your teams to reach new levels of productivity.

Flow solutions

You can build and improve your existing workflows with AppExchange’s Flow solutions. These are drag-and-drop building blocks that perform new actions on your existing software without requiring you to write code or manage complex integrations.

Many Flows automate existing workflows, accelerating productivity and allowing staff to focus on higher-level tasks. For example, call center agents can automate case creation and resolve cases faster with call scripting. Managers can easily assign new members to teams and distribute leads. Knowledge workers can create documents with the click of a button. IT staff can simplify dashboard creation for different groups and quickly provision, update, and delete users for popular apps like Microsoft 365, Concur, Box, and Dropbox.

Flows can automate sales proposals, keep calendars and contacts in sync, and allow employees to check the weather forecast as they make travel plans, allowing teams to work faster and collaborate without distracting back-and-forth messaging.

Flows can also add new capabilities to your everyday processes without disrupting users as they work. For example, they can seamlessly accept credit card payments, conduct credit checks, send feedback surveys, or add a video player to your content.

If you’re looking for quick productivity-enhancing solutions, Flows are an excellent place to start.

AppExchange collections

AppExchange Collections let you zero in on solutions that suit your niche. There are two types: Industry Collections and Product Collections. Both are located on the top navigation bar on appexchange.com.

Every industry has unique needs, and the dozen curated Industry Collections take you directly to apps that address challenges specific to financial services, healthcare and life sciences, education, government, manufacturing, media, nonprofits, and other types of businesses.

For example, manufacturers generate price quotes for complex products and services with Conga CPQ. Healthcare systems match patients to the right providers, schedule appointments, and sync with other providers to coordinate care with Kyruus’ ProviderMatch for Salesforce. School districts connect teachers, administrators, and leaders with the information they need to address student needs, engage families, and set up new processes to improve results with the free K-12 Architecture Kit.

Product Collections enable you to search for apps and experts that extend Salesforce. For example, for Sales Cloud users, Mercury SMS speeds customer interactions through text messaging, MuleSoft dataloader.io imports, exports, and deletes unlimited amounts of data, and Formstack makes it easy to build your own forms.

Service Cloud users can manage teams and measure performance with Service & Support Dashboards and enable voice telephony with Natterbox or Vonage.Technology from RWS Language Wever even allows agents to understand customers speaking in any language. 

Other prebuilt apps extend the capabilities of Marketing Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Health Cloud, Experience Cloud, Net Zero Cloud, or any other Salesforce product. All will lead you to easy shortcuts, so your teams boost productivity and impress customers with new experiences. 

If you’re looking for quick efficiency-generating solutions, Flows are an excellent place to start.

Lastly, collection pages feature consulting partners. These are organizations with certified experts on staff to help you with Salesforce implementations, migrations, updates, and so much more. You’ll increase revenue while freeing your marketers, sales, and support teams to provide better customer care and devise new strategies to accommodate your expanding business.

Today, customers expect brands to understand their wants and needs whether they’re shopping online, visiting a store, or calling customer service. By using real-time data in the AppExchange Genie and CRM Analytics Collections, companies gain the knowledge to give customers the right information at the right time — critical tactics for improving marketing touches and growing sales.

Enhancing the power of Salesforce Genie

To keep marketers, salespeople, managers, and others aware of constantly changing customer activity, Salesforce Genie connects customer data from apps, devices, and real-time streams, automatically harmonizing it into a single customer graph. Real-time data allows managers to see incoming order flows and make better decisions about purchasing and stocking to keep up with demand trends. 

Having data at your fingertips allows you to meet your customers where they are — but only if you know how to use it. And despite all the information today’s companies collect, many have trouble deploying it effectively. In a Salesforce survey of more than 1,000 marketing executives, 57% said they often don’t have the data to understand customers or anticipate their needs. 

With the AppExchange Genie Collection, you’ll do more with Salesforce Genie by connecting you to apps and experts designed to build efficiency. For example, Chargent adds real-time customer payment data from over 30 sources — including PayPal and Stripe — to your Salesforce ordering and invoicing systems, updating your records with accurate information in near real time.

Other Salesforce Genie apps help you improve data collection. For example, Criteo uses lookalike modeling across a network of 685 million shoppers to help you find new prospects similar to your own most loyal shoppers. Nine Audience Activation and Resolve Connector for CDP gives you ways to track customers without using cookies. And these three apps are free.

Salesforce Genie apps improve the quality of your customer data. For example, Identity Enrichment by LiveIntent updates and verifies the demographic information on customer profiles, including age, gender, income, children, marital status, education level, household status, language, lifestyle, and interest categories. 

In addition to apps, certified consulting partners can help you build better customer profiles and automate the delivery of relevant, up-to-date advertising that will lead to measurable improvements in customer experience, customer acquisition, conversion, customer service, and loyalty.

Delivering smarter marketing with CRM analytics

The AppExchange CRM Analytics Collection uses data analytics to deliver intelligent recommendations leading to faster, better marketing decisions — and bottom-line results. A Salesforce survey of customer success metrics found that using CRM Analytics increased close rates by 26%.

Apps in the CRM Analytics Collection make your marketing stand out even among the toughest competitors. For example, Tableau CRM Learning Adventure gives you step-by-step instructions for designing powerful apps with data visualizations that capture and hold customers’ attention. Its best-practice examples and use cases make creating these dynamic apps easy and fun.

Sales Analytics brings the power of Einstein Analytics to Sales Cloud, delivering instant insights that show you what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do next. You can set accurate forecasts and prioritize working on deals that stand the best chance of closing, delivering revenue sooner. Associates and managers can track pipeline movement and update records in real time on any device. With Einstein Analytics Bulk Actions, you can launch custom actions to give each campaign the boost it needs to succeed.

With so much data flying around both within and outside of the organization, it’s important to protect the organization’s sensitive information. Metazoa Snapshot enables you to improve security and compliance and monitor user activity over time. It also simplifies administrative chores, removing unused data and connections to inactive users to save you money.

Real-time data gives you a deeper understanding of how your teams function and what your customers want. Used in the right ways, the insights it provides are powerful. The Collections pages for Salesforce Genie and CRM Analytics are filled with apps that enable you to collect the right data and maximize value, making operations more efficient across the organization and delivering superior marketing that gets results.

The right tools for a new era

In an age when customers expect a seamless journey, constantly updated information, and personalized experience across all channels at all times, organizations need a strong arsenal of tools to keep up. With its ever-growing collection of partner apps and experts, AppExchange offers a vast choice of standout solutions that work hand in hand to turbocharge your Customer 360. No matter what industry you’re in, you will find tailored apps — often available for free or at low cost — to solve your business challenges and achieve measurable results. 

Discover the right apps and experts for you on AppExchange.